Hi, I'm using Neat Video in FCP on two sets of clips. The first set turned out great, but I'm not having any luck with the second. I suspect it's because I don't have any large, flat areas of color to sample.

The auto sampling found the large green book cover on the left. I manually added a sample of uniform skin area and a couple of the book spines in the background. Still, it doesn't look much better than the unfiltered clip.

Any suggestions on improving the profile or filter settings?

One idea I had was to try to simulate the lighting and exposure as closely as possible, take a close-up shot of a color chart, and then sample the color squares in the clip and apply the profile to the attached footage. Same camera, but not exactly the same conditions....however, much better color samples than I have in this shot. Does that make any sense?

Reproducing the shooting conditions is of course reasonable but that is much more difficult than just using the available clip. I have just tried to build a noise profile using automatic selection by Auto Profile in one of the frames from the first half of the clip. Auto Profile does select the book on the left and the resulting profile seem to be good enough. I haven't used any furher manual adjustments and just continued to apply the filter. Then the preview in FCP already shows a significantly better picture. Increasing the temporal filter radius further reduces the noise.

Please try to use Auto Profile alone and check the preview in NV and FCP. Re-build and manually improve the profile only when previews are not good. Please also make sure you follow the steps described in the user guide when doing semi-automatic and manual profiling.